Page:Charles Grafly, Sculptor, an appreciatiative note, Trask, 1910.djvu/7

 of its damning title, its full melody of form awakens the echoing chords which Milton loved to stir.

The sculptor's power of expression continues through many plastic forms and though more trammeled by the limitations of low-relief he has produced at least one such work, the Scheel Memorial, which has enduring qualities and which, even without them, would still arrest attention by its decorative adornment. "A Head," in marble carved in such high relief as to be almost in the round, sways one by its beauty and reasserts his control of the cutting-tool. The manual dexterity of his boyhood remains, controlled now by mature mental grasp.

Power rewards sincerity and from sincerity he has never swerved.

A century ago, in the bright youth of our national life, our growing merchant fleet bore proudly around the world the carven figure-heads of Rush, first of American sculptors. Today we do reverence to St. Gaudens, who, in his Sherman, his Shaw Memorial, his Lincoln and his Farragut has placed the enduring stamp of Art upon the heroes of the nation's second birth.

Rush began and St. Gaudens ended the first century and the first cycle of sculpture in America. Each was an artist. Neither ever wholly freed himself from certain habits of expression resultant from the medium of his first endeavors.

Now, we look forward hopefully to peace, prosperity, and that national well-being without which, in the whole world's history, no art has reached its best. The conditions of today continuing, it is logically certain that art will achieve higher and purer expressions in the near future.

In sculpture we see already the 88